War pedagogy and youth culture: Nationalism and authority in Germany in the First World War.

Abstract

The dissertation, the first comprehensive study of German youth in the First World War, presents arguments about the powers of popular patriotic mobilization, the rise of fascism and radical politics, the growing importance of the life course and generational cohorts, the origins of revolutions, the ascendancy of modern youth cultures, the transformations of the public sphere, and the uses of modern pedagogical practices. It addresses these broader problems in its analysis of the so-called war youth generation, whose distinguishing socialization it ascribes to three circumstances: the absence of paternal authority due to conscription, a radical change in the public sphere, and a steady erosion of the legitimacy of the state. Just as central in the dissertation are the development of a highly nationalist curriculum that implemented suprisingly progressive teaching methods and the rise of conditions that permitted youths to establish new spheres of autonomy outside direct adult control. The dissertation locates the origins of a politicized youth in conditions that loosened the relationship of authority and allowed a set of male youth in particular to establish new social spaces where they asserted an often politically aggressive self-consciousness. These arguments are made through an exploration of crime, work, street behavior, reading culture, associational life, socialist protest, military training, and secondary and primary schooling. The force of these arguments relies on a variety of methods and approaches, including cohort analysis, discourse analysis, quantitative content analysis, literary analysis, political narrative, sociological theory, and comparative national frameworks. Whenever it can, the dissertation suggests the agency of youths on politics and social regulation. Its research draws upon police files, school disciplinary records, newspaper clipping collections, and other state and municipal documents in over twenty archives in ten cities. It also uses articles in over forty educational and welfare journals, over 650 novels, poems, and short stories written for youth, and a set of over 1,200 essays written by schoolchildren that document their personal experience and emotions.